Ubuntu: Unbleached and Unreconciled
Ubuntu’s origins must not be conflated with its theorisation and deployment as anti-imperial resistance. Its obligations concerning personhood and collective life already carry political meaning. Colonial domination intensified their expression through survival and resistance. In this poem, Pheko invites the audience to consider the demands of ubuntu, what ubuntu is and what it is not.
Ubuntu
is not your slogan.
Not your quote.
Not your lanyard language
swinging from the neck of empire.
Ubuntu was never polite.
It was never
“I am because you are”
said softly, said sweetly, said safely
over stolen land.
Ubuntu was born
where survival was resistance, where being human was an act of war
against annihilation.
You took the word
and bleached it.
Scrubbed it until it stopped bleeding.
Until it stopped accusing you.
Until it fit inside corporate fonts
and Heritage Day speeches.
You called that philosophy.
But Ubuntu does not exist
for white comfort.
Ubuntu comes from -ntu/’ntho
flesh, breath, being-a person forged in obligation, not abstraction.
Accountable to the living, the dead, and the unborn.
That is not a metaphor.
That is Divine law.
Hunhu says:
nothing is resolved until what was broken
is repaired.
Ukama says: your wellness is a lie
if the land is dying.
Seriti says:
your aura cannot glow inside systems built on erasure.
Ma’at says:
there is no balance where empire rudely stands.
Cosmic order does not negotiate with theft.
Ubuntu does not reconcile without repair.
Does not forgive without restitution.
Does not make peace with violence
that still denies its own impact.
Forgiveness without justice is colossal fraud.
You cannot plagiarise a worldview and hide it under a rainbow.
You cannot footnote a people into silence.
There is no Botho in racial capitalism.
There is no Ubuntu in empire’s genocides.
Ubuntu/Botho is Afrikan
Unmistakably. Unapologetically. Uncontainably.
It is not ‘post-racial’.
Not neutral.
Not available for rebranding.
It comes from people declared non-human
who insisted on humanity anyway.
Pan Afrikanism did not resurrect Ubuntu so that it could be managed.
Liberation theology did not invoke it
so that it could be domesticated.
Afrikan women did not carry it through blood and silence
so that patriarchy could shamelessly hide inside it.
Ubuntu cannot coexist easily
with settler domination-
It names theft.
It names violence.
It names epistemic crime.
It rejects gatekeepers who arrive late and claim authority.
It knows its custodians.
Ubuntu is not asking for inclusion.
Ubuntu is refusing erasure.
Insisting on memory over amnesia.
Demanding justice over comfort.
Ubuntu survived chains, missions, borders,
books written against it.
It survived because it is not merely an idea.
It is a refusal to stop being human.
Ubuntu is not your peace offer.
Ubuntu is a declaration of Black being.
Memory with teeth.
Personhood that will not bow.
Ubuntu is not here to make colonialism comfortable.
Ubuntu is here to end it.
Lebohang Liepollo Pheko (DPhil) is an international political economist, decolonial feminist scholar and Professor of Practice whose work examines political economy, development, racial capitalism and Afrikan economic sovereignty.